


My Name Is Ruby

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-01
Updated: 2011-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-25 14:28:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruby's Story</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this anonymously for Rory when they expressed in a tag that they wanted Ruby/Lilith fic and all the hell politics. So I did and this is the end result. It is by far the longest work of fanfiction I've ever written and I'm kind of proud of it.

Mother wasn’t mother anymore.

It happened one morning after they had gathered up all the people who had died and brought them to the trench. Mother was sick, swelled up and discoloured.

She should have died.

But she didn’t die. She just got up from the floor and walked one day, stepping over the corpse at the door like it wasn’t her son anymore, Ruby following, because there wasn’t time to mourn. There was only bodies to bury and the next meal to find.

That was the first time Mother stopped being Mother.

Instead, she was the miracle.

She should have died.

Ruby had expected her to die that afternoon.

But she got up and walked instead.

Mother said she wasn’t anything like that, and she laughed when she did, but they said she was being humble.

Ruby knew better.

The survivors asked her to heal their sons and daughters. Mother put her hands on them and murmured in Latin.

She didn’t say the words like the priest.

She said them better. Like she’d been speaking them with authority her whole life instead of listening to them. Ruby thought some of the words were missing, but she wasn’t sure.

Regardless, she said nothing because her mother was walking on legs that should be stiff with the death-cold, and talking with air that should have staled in her lungs.

Sometimes the people she spoke over got better.

Most times they didn’t.

If the light from the fire hit her eyes right, Ruby saw that they were black. Blacker than midnight. Blacker than the shadows in the grave. Sometimes her mouth was set cruel, and sometimes, if they were out of the streets and the houses and the corpses and the sickness, she could smell that Mother was sour and rotten and not like Mother at all.

But Ruby knew. She knew that she was going to bury Mother that day.

So maybe it was okay.

Because Mother still helped dig the mass graves. Mother still helped pack bodies up nice and neat. Mother still sang while she worked though maybe she hit more of the right notes than before. And she still remembered to find food for dinner even if she forgot to run her hand over Ruby’s head, greasy and dirty and live with lice, like she used to do before they rested for the night.

Sometimes, Mother didn’t sleep. Ruby would wake up in the night and Mother would stare at the window with her eyes full of shadows and night. Sometimes she sewed stitches in herself, but when Ruby closed her eyes and fell asleep, woke up the next morning, the stitches were gone and maybe they had never been there before.

Sometimes Mother would be gone. She came back with food. Sometimes she came back with new dark stains on her clothes, hair wet and dripping. Sometimes her teeth were red, her tongue swollen and thick.

It took a long time before Mother went to bed. Sometimes she left after the sun dipped below the horizon, and didn’t come back till dawn.

And still she worked. Planting. Burying. Butchering.

Surviving.

One day, when Mother came back dragging deer, she said, “You ever need help. Go to the crossroads, and bury this box. And don’t you dare open it.”

Mother wouldn’t open her fingers until Ruby had sworn on her love for her mother that she wouldn’t.

Mother showed Ruby how to make hex bags to ward off plague and sickness. When Ruby asked why they didn’t make them for all their neighbors, Mother snapped her eyes up, filmed with smoke and shadow for a brief instant. “Why can’t they ask for help?”

“But they do,” Ruby said.

“They ask for prayers and blessings and I happily oblige.” Mother threaded a strip of leather through the bag, let it drop over Ruby’s head. It wasn’t very heavy, and Ruby fingered it, tongue between her lips, wondering how this bag of scraps could ever forestall the mass graves.

Mother batted her hands away, tucked it under her rough, dirt-crusted cloths so that nobody could see.

“Have faith,” Mother said. “You’ll live a long life. Free from pain. Relatively speaking. If you wear this always.”

Mother didn’t make one for herself.

That’s when Ruby was sure that Mother wasn’t Mother anymore.

But she didn’t mind.

Mother taught her more about hex bags. Told her to stop calling her “mother” unless they were with other people. Taught her words that were big in her mouth but soon she swallowed them down like veal. And the words had power—not like the words of the clergy which were just huffs of air. These words made sure they never wanted food. Made sure the cold never settled in their bones. Mother taught her how to translate those breaths of air strung with sound into marks on parchment, dirt, or cloth. How to mix gallnuts and alcohol and the dreck from washed up nails to make ink, which was more delicate and clever than blood, or that’s what Mother said.

Sometimes, Mother went out at night and didn’t come back with meat from the forest but with scrolls and parchments that had been lettered by the priests, made Ruby read them out loud to her. Told her which words were wrong, which words were right and, after enough time had gone on, Mother told Ruby which concepts the clergy had got wrong, which bits of their Bible were inaccurate, and Ruby listened and stopped being so afraid because she hadn’t been hungry in days and she no longer feared eternal condemnation in hell—what’s hell like, Mother? It’s hell, with a tight smile, fingers curved stiff and spindly, and Ruby remembered Mother sewing her skin open and shut at the window, and she knew that Mother, the thing inside Mother, had clawed her way out of hell. Ruby had always been told that the demons were wrong, that they were ugly, that they would kill and corrupt, whittle her down to the raw nub of her soul—but then Mother opened her up along the seams of her skin, showed her how the heart worked, tendons relaxing and contracting, how oxygen infused her system with life, how the bones of her hand fit together and how they could be knit together again with the right words. When the clergy urged the sick to repent so that God would bless them once more with health, Mother murmured to Ruby and told her what should be done instead, what herbs should be administered, how one should scalpel sick and rotted flesh. Sometimes the people let her, but more often they didn’t because she was a woman and she was strange with her black eyes and her mouth full of words.

When children were orphaned, Mother took them in. She started to teach them what she had already taught Ruby—not everything-everything because they were still small—but Ruby knew that she was Mother’s favorite when Mother brought her with her during the night and they would hunt the deer and crawl on forest floor until their skin was scuffed with dirt and Mother would teach her how to use her body so that no one but Ruby could use it anyway she willed.

It was around this time that Mother stopped being the miracle and became someone else, something that other mothers shielded their children from because the scrawny dogs yapped at her, someone from whom men averted their eyes because she carried herself with something not like other women, someone from whom urchins scurried away because they saw an emptiness that wasn’t filled with pet names or a crust of bread.

Then the hunters came with their memorized lists of signs and omens for the bad things, belts hung with iron and leather bags. And the people, the people who didn’t like Mother when before they had fawned over her, told them about the strange woman who responded to her old name but just wasn’t the same because they had seen her sling buck over her shoulders when before she had staggered under the weight of surviving.

They came with their salt and their iron and they silenced Mother and dragged her away. Ruby clawed at them and they put their hands over her mouth until she bit their dirty palms, but they still chanted in Latin until Mother shook—until her eyes were black caves set deep in their sockets, her lips snug against her barred teeth, no longer rotting in their gums, screaming, scrabbling at the dirt floors with her fingers until the nail beds bled—and Ruby pulled against the men holding her back, hand outstretched, fingers grasping at the air, trying to clutch Mother close so that she wouldn’t be dragged back to hell—until she vomited smoke, and then she really wasn’t Mother anymore—just a plague ridden body collapsed on the ground.

Then hunters dashed holy water in her face and chanted just to make sure she didn’t have black eyes like Mother. And of course Ruby didn’t and then she was just a girl, just some girl who had been caught under a bitch-demon’s spell, just some girl they talked over when she told them not to call her that, just some girl who had been confused and that it was going to be okay, the demon was gone, the town was safe even though a plague ridden body was sitting in the center of it, burning and burning, with salt scattered across its flesh.

And they put their hand heavy on her shoulder as she stared into the burning pyre, surrounding by Mother’s orphans, pulling at her clothes, tears in her eyes, and Ruby didn’t want to hunt for food for them by herself. “Don’t worry. Bitch has gone back to hell. Back to where she come from. Suffering’s fine and welcome but they’ll just come back again.”

And then Mother was gone, consumed by the fire.

But not really Mother. Just the person she had used.

Ruby went to the crossroads, box clenched in her fist. She buried it like Mother had said and waited until she heard the soft crunch of twigs beneath bare feet and a scrap of a girl, eyes filmed with something red, like she burned on the inside, crept from the underbrush, naked and dirty, body crusted with weeping sores that slowly healed themselves.

“What do you want me to do for you?” the child whispered, feet sliding one in front of the other, dirt and cobwebbed leaves clinging to the knuckles of her toes.

“I want Mother back.” And then she gave Mother’s true name, the second time she’d ever spoken it after Mother made her repeat it back to her.

The demon didn’t say anything. “Like asking for the moon. Souls special delivery—special circumstances only.” Her red glazed eyes slid up and down Ruby. “You’re not special circumstances. Maybe if you were a king. But you’re no king.”

“Could be a king,” Ruby said. “Could be king of this whole forest.” She forced herself not to reach for the demon’s throat, squeezing the tender parts just like Mother had taught her. “We’ve eaten the lord’s deer—still haven’t been caught.”

“Lord don’t make you a king,” the child sniffed. Then the child crinkled up her nose, took a deep sniff. “Besides. Soul’s worthless. You’re already ours. Don’t get something for free—not from a crossroads deal.”

Ruby stooped down until she didn’t have to look down at the child. “I want to see your master.”

The child pushed at her. “We don’t always get what we want.”

“I’ll exorcise you don’t think I won’t, and I’ll do the ritual again, until I get what I want,” Ruby said.

“Enough,” said a new voice.

Ruby turned to see a woman in white robes and white eyes and white in her hair approach. “I’m Lilith.” The red-eyed demon shied away as Lilith reached out for Ruby with her hands, cupped her jaw, hand sliding down her neck until it rested over her heart. “Your soul already does belong to us. Did you know that?”

“Mother always did say that you give yourself away when you love too hard,” Ruby said. “Advised against it.”

Lilith dipped closer, lips close to Ruby’s ear. “But that didn’t stop you.” The woman sighed at Ruby, then flicked her hands at the red-eyed demon. She disappeared, leaving them alone. “But just because your soul isn’t yours anymore doesn’t mean we can’t deal.”

“A trade then,” Ruby said. “Mother can come back here and keep the orphans safe because they love her too, they love her more than the bread she finds for them each day, love her like I love her. And I will take her place.”

“You’ll take her place in hell?” Lilith said, eyes still big and white. “Why?”

Because Mother didn’t want to be there anymore. Because she didn’t deserve to be there. Hadn’t done anything to be ripped from her body like that. “Just because.”

“We have a deal then,” Lilith said. “Deals are always sealed with a kiss.”

“I know,” Ruby said because Mother had taught her. She leaned towards Lilith, put her hands on her shoulders, kissed Lilith, and tasted sulfur before the brown green smell of the forest vanished in the searing smoke of hellfire and her skin burned in smoke.


	2. While In Hell

In hell, she didn’t have a body—not at first.

In the beginning, she was just her soul.

And, for a breathtaking moment, she was free for the first time—free from flesh, free from the pull of the earth, free from flesh that needed oxygen, fuel, water, free from a body that could starve and die.

Perhaps that was the worst part—

being crammed into a body spun from nettles, flesh woven with thorns, eyes and mouth filled with sand, unable to speak, but noises for mercy

no sun or moon or evening or morning

no stars

but the flare of fire consuming her, hell a kiln, smoothing her into glass—

dropping her from a great height

shattering against ice, snow howling around the fragments of her soul, whipping the jagged pieces until they’re spun into crystal, fragile lace clustered around her bone-fragile neck, bared for all the world to see, for all the hands to rip them from her throat like beads—

then flesh again, a body once like hers perhaps, with a covering that looked like skin, smooth, and it didn’t hurt to touch even though it ached on the inside, like her soul was too raw—and Lilith came to her, knelt before her, cupped her chin with a palm too hot and a palm too cold, and said without moving her lips or using a voice,  _What’s your name?_

And she tried to speak, but the body was wrong, incomplete because it wasn’t hers, and when she tried to open her mouth, she couldn’t—and she wrenched away from Lilith, wondering if they had sewn her lips shut, some cruel joke, but she ran her hands over her mouth, and there was nothing there, and she was just weak, she was just tired, because this was hell, unending torment and a gnashing of teeth, and she wondered if that noise, bone-scraping growl, was coming from her—

 _What’s your name?_

So she stretched out her hand and wrote  _Ruby_  in the ash at her feet before it was blown away by hellfire winds.

 _Good_ , Lilith said.  _Someone is coming for you now, Ruby—Alistair—do not let him scratch out your name because that is what he does, he will steal it from your tongue and burn it from your flesh. He makes you forget—remember why you’re here, Ruby. Do you remember?_

Maybe it was because Lilith was so close when she had been alone for so long, but Ruby remembered that—that feeling of someone close, calling a name that was yours, all your own. This time, when Ruby tried to open her mouth, her lips split open, and her voice, scraped raw, croaked, “Mother?”

Lilith nodded, then she was gone and Ruby was alone again until she wasn’t, until she was before Alistair and he carved and tried to find her name, but when he asked, she always said, “Ruby,” until he took her tongue away, until he gave her a new body and began again.

Sometimes, Lilith, the one who had told her to guard her name, the only who ever had, would come to him, and she would survey his handiwork, and instead of him asking the question, she bent her head down and whispered in her ear, “Do you remember your name,” and if Ruby was feeling strong she’d spit it out and if she was feeling weak, she’d roll her eyes up into Lilith’s face, so that Lilith could see it written there, on that nub of her soul.

Ruby didn’t know how long she was in hell. How long Alistair tried to gouge out her name. How long she hung on the rack.

She just knew that she was tired of it.

That she wanted out.

That she wanted it to be over.

So when he asked her what her name was, she didn’t say anything. She shook her head, and she hung limp, and she begged for mercy with bubbling noises in her throat. But Alistair saw the lie, and he kept her there, until she learned how to hide her name away, to hide in plain sight, and when Lilith came, he tore her down into a crumpled, smoking heap.

Lilith’s face, always a mask, did not flicker, but she stooped to her knees, leaned close over her without touching and asked, “What is your name?”

She didn’t raise her head. She didn’t split the seams around her lips. She shook and quivered. _Ruby_ .

“I’ll take her now,” Lilith said.

“Bitch has been well trained,” Alastair said. “Only good for carnage and mayhem. Fetching more souls down to me. All she’s good for now,” he added as he turned to his rack, heavy with others.

Lilith hauled Ruby to her feet, and Ruby let herself sway on them, weaving after Lilith through the burning, smoking pillars of hell. When they were alone together, Ruby said, tongue thick and clumsy, “Don’t call me that. Nobody’s bitch. I’m Ruby.  _Ruby._ ” She blinked her eyes hard because there was something in there that she couldn’t quite get out.

“Not as broken as he thinks you are,” Lilith said. She cupped Ruby’s jaw, pressed something warm against her forehead—something like a kiss, Ruby thought. “And they say that demons can’t be beautiful.”

“Other demons forget their names,” Ruby said, a little uncertainly, worn skin still flinching as if it expected Alastair to peel it from her again, trying to find her name.

“Most,” Lilith said. “But not you.”

“Not me. Not ever me.” Ruby was silent, her fingers whispering against each other, before she raised her eyes to Lilith. “We have to find their names again. We have to help them remember. Fill them back up again—” she turned, ears hearing for the first time the shattering emptiness of hell underneath the ragged voices, souls empty without their names to rattle inside them, bare plates begging for food as children starved, stomachs scraped black, empty, and hollow. 

Ruby crumpled to her knees under the silence, mouth open to fill the void with sound, but Lilith pressed her fingers to her lips. “Shhhh. Not yet, Ruby, not yet.” 

And Ruby closed her eyes, whispering her name over and over, each syllable a hard bead strung through her teeth, her hands, her fingers.


	3. Ruby's Body

Once free from the body Alistair had given her, the one that had never been hers, Ruby was better able to hear the silence. It was the worst part of hell. The silence as people forgot their names, their souls empty and thirsty and hungry.

Lilith filled the silence with words. “There is a time,” she said, “when hell will no longer sit back, a forgotten pot boiling on the fire.” She shaped the barren deserts of hell, scorched with hellfire—spun sand with the delicate touch of her hands—a river of glass flowing from her fingertips.

“Sometimes, when the souls crawl from the pit—” and her fingers clenched around the ribbons of sand and glass, fracturing and breaking, until she smoothed it clear again with her palm— “they find a body, a sanctuary—”

 _But they’re sent back,_  Ruby said.  _Sent back to—Alistair._

“Alistair cannot help himself,” Lilith said, shaping the glassed sand with her fingers, pushing and prodding. Sweat from the heat, from hell, pearled her forehead, netting the curls of her hair, dripping onto her handiwork.

Ruby couldn’t ever remember if Lilith had ever appeared as anything or anyone but human. She hovered closer to her, watching as a leg formed under Lilith’s hand.

“He does what he was made to do,” Lilith said.

 _By who?_

“Depends on who you ask,” Lilith said, her lips pulled tight against her teeth. She coaxed another leg into being from the ribbons of sand and glass spooled around her feet.

 _That leg was shorter than the other_ .

Lilith twisted the leg, torqued her wrist just so and it was no longer perfect.

“What is your name?” Lilith said almost absently as she began to sculpt abdominal muscles, a dipping navel, a hard jut of hip bones, hollowed by hunger and malnutrition.

 _Ruby_ , she said.  _My name is Ruby—_ hard like stone after she saw Lilith’s narrow sideways glare sliding and slicing, sharp against the hell-fire sun.

“Do you remember your father?”

 _No._

“I remember mine,” Lilith said, hardening glass, sharp edges rough with sand, in her hands. The edges bit into her palms, and blood stained the red-brown sands of the deserts as Lilith bent them into a cage, empty and waiting.

 _Did he make you, too?_   Lilith’s sweat slid from her neck and onto the ropes of sand and glass. Under the deft flicks and twists of her fingers, she left wet smudges on sloping bones of glass, breathed smooth away with the fog of her breath.

“He unraveled me, sewed me back together again—but dropped a few stitches along the way,” Lilith said. Her hands seized into claws, marring the smooth surfaces of water and sand and glass. Slowly, she relaxed, and her fingers dimpled around the jarring cut of a collarbone. “I went back for your body, but the hunters had already burned and salted it.”

It surprised Ruby that the knowledge needled her, stuck her in the tiny spaces of her soul not rubbed coarse with callouses.  _Where is he now, your father?_

Lilith shaped the last of the glass and sand into something like a human face—with no distinguishing features. It looked vaguely like one of the faceless dolls the very small children carried with them before their bones creaked from labor, fingers stiff with the cold, stomachs big and swollen into a gaping mouth craving food. “Locked away for his sins. For me.” Her laughter broke against the silence like shattered glass. “If it hadn’t been—I would have lived and I would have died, and I would have gone to heaven.”

She turned the body she had made face downwards where the back was left wide and open—a door. “Get in,” she said. “Let yourself flow like water. And finish it.”

As Ruby slipped inside, she jerked when she felt Lilith button her up, one vertebrae disk at a time. _There’s no room for us_ , Ruby said as she swelled inside the body, as she suffused each dip and hollow, cut herself against the bones of glass hardening into something more, something stronger. She flexed her fingers, clever and limber. She touched the smooth planes of her face, and stiffened in pain as her soul seared a space for her eyes.

She touched both her palms against each of Lilith’s hands, felt the thrum of something sparking and hot, the power that had turned sand and glass into flesh and blood as her soul supplied the organs that had always beat of their own accord—the first staggering steps of her heart, the swell of her lungs gasping for air as she stood on her own two feet in a desert.

“Finish it,” Lilith said, dropping her hands to her sides.

Ruby spat in her palm, rubbed the liquid over her cheeks—prodded her face with her finger tips, fashioned lips as her soul grew a tongue that sputtered consonants and vowels in a rush of sound breaking against her teeth.

She fashioned a nose splashed with freckles, and the grit from the desert made her sneeze. Her hands trailed lower, shaping her small, sagging breasts, the right one with that small, hard lump that Ruby had found one day when she had been human, the one that Mother had assured would never grow bigger or badder. 

She dipped her hands lower where her legs parted, clever fingers rolling a bead of flesh and nerves, hooded and folded with thin, delicate skin, leading into lips that hungered and wanted and desired.

And when she was finished, she straightened, bent her knees, testing her joints and her tendons. She folded at the waist, fingertips ghosting over the fragile protrusion of her ankles that twisted and rolled in their sockets—stood on her tiptoes, flung her arms out wide until she felt the stretch and pull against her chest, and breathed the desert and the air and the stench of sulfur that cloyed everything.

“Is it good?” Lilith said.

Ruby wet her lips with her tongue. “It’s good.” She stepped close to Lilith, took her hand, put it over the space where her heart beat under flesh and blood and bone.

Lilith breathed the beat of her heart, shaped its rhythm with sound until it was a keening song, a thread of silk underneath the silence.

“If there is no room for us,” Ruby said, spreading her palm against Lilith’s chest, feeling her scudding heartbeat vibrating against her newly spun skin, “then we need to carve out our own space, tear it from the pillars of hell, shape it from the earth, and pull it down from the sky.”

And for the first time, Ruby saw Lilith smile. 


	4. Not Like Other Demons

Ruby’s not like other demons.

At first it was hard, being in hell and being a demon, wielding a razor like it was a part of her as sure as her name was still etched on her bones all the way down to her marrow.

But she did it for Lilith because she had slipped her hand under her jaw, whispered in the ear spun from sand and glass that Ruby had to do this thing for her, or else the demons would know that she and Lilith were not like other demons, and—as she dragged her finger from Ruby’s forehead down the slope of her nose—they would whisper amidst each other in the darkness. Lilith rested the pad of her finger on Ruby’s lips—so they had to keep it secret—and, nuzzling against her neck, breath hot and damp and steaming from hellfire—could Ruby keep a secret?

And Ruby pushed Lilith down, pinned her, forced her to look into her eyes and see her name still hidden there in plain sight where nobody could see it but her and Lilith. I promise, Ruby had said, pressing her lips to Lilith. I promise, she had said again, kissing deeper. And her tongue had sealed one final promise against Lilith’s before Lilith had told her that she needed to go, that she needed to keep her promise, to go where all the demons go, every one a student of Alastair.

But before she left, Ruby knelt in the desert of sand and glass and spun a vial which she slung around her neck. Because she didn’t have to be Alastair who cut and carved them into new animals when they forgot their names. She’d do all those things yes, she would, she thought as she stood before the rack, before a whimpering woman, all finger-flexed hands and fear and eyes, but she didn’t have to be like him.

The newly arrived weren’t strong like Ruby was, and she would protect them, hold them close in the way that Lilith never could.

She approached quickly, the blade heavy in her hand. “What’s your name?” she asked, always the first and only words to leave her mouth. And the woman told her in a voice crooked with sobs and pain. But Ruby didn’t think about that, slicing and carving until she found the place the woman’s name sat inside of her.

And when the woman could no longer remember her name, when it slid from her like spilled oil, Ruby caught it in her vial spun from the deserts of hell, and kept it safe for when the day came that Lilith and she found a space for demons, where they would find their names or forge new ones if given half a breath of peace.

And so it went.

Sometimes, Lilith would descend to the torture chambers, and she would look upon Ruby’s work, her eyes falling to the secret place where Ruby kept the vial of names she had saved from being devoured and consumed by the gnashing teeth of the pit, and she would look away without smiling—but Ruby clutched the vial to her heart, hot with the breath of a thousand thousand names, and had faith that one day they would fly free of the cage built upon flesh and blood and bone and silence, beyond reach of salt or holy words shoving them down, down into the pit.

And, after a great long while, when the demons had forgotten that it was Lilith who had brought Ruby down from the earth, when her fingers and her blade were red, when the body that Lilith had spun for her was splashed with blood, when Ruby was stoppering another countless name, Lilith came to her, told her to come into her chambers.

And when they were alone, the sands and glass unchanged as if no time had gone by at all even though Ruby knew it had, had felt its jagged claws in her skin, drawing out the seconds, the minutes, the hours into weeks, months, years, Lilith pressed a kiss to her forehead. “What is your name,” she whispered.

She brought Lilith’s hand to her lips. “My name is Ruby.”

“You’ve kept your promise,” Lilith said.

“Of course.”

Lilith dragged her hand through Ruby’s hair, tugging only a little so that Ruby exposed her throat to her, but not enough to hurt. “I’m going to show you something.”

Her other hand, fingernails hard and sharp against her skin, slid down Ruby’s neck as she drew back and revealed, sprawled on the floor, blood puddling under his back, a young man. “His name is Sam Winchester. He has Azazel’s blood—one of his litter rats.”

Ruby shuddered, remembering the yellow eyes of Azazel, the ones that saw better than any other demons in the black shadows of the pit. She had been so afraid that he would see her name, but then he had gone up to the earth and never returned. “I’ve heard of him,” Ruby said. “He’s to lead the demon army, the uprising out of hell?”

“More than that—he is my father’s vessel,” Lilith said, her thin fingers wrapped around his frail wrist, tightening until Ruby wondered if Lilith intended to snap the bones clean through. “He will enter him and prowl the earth like a lion, consuming and devouring. Hungry, all the time.”

Ruby frowned into the too young face of Sam Winchester, at the fringe stuck close against his forehead. “Doesn’t have much of a mane though, does he?”

Lilith’s lip quirked upward. “His brother, right now, is making a deal to bring him back,” Lilith said. “Because Dean Winchester is not like Michael. And would never leave his brother to suffer in hell.”

“Doesn’t know he’s getting a lion’s skin though, does he?” Ruby said.

“Hardly anyone knows,” Lilith said. “Only you and me and Father.” She turned her eyes onto Ruby. “When his deal is up, I am going to drag Dean Winchester down to hell, and I am going to give him to Alastair and Alastair will break him—” she raised her finger to Ruby’s lips – “you will not be here, you will not interfere.”

“I saved my kin,” Ruby said, breath like sulfur. “If I’m not here, who is going to catch his name when he breaks, when it’s ripped out of him by devils?” She clutched the vial of names against her chest.

“Dean Winchester is a righteous man, sacrificing his life for his brother,” Lilith said. “Doing what it is that Cain failed to do. Doing what it is that Michael failed to do. All good things begin with a sacrifice.” She palmed Ruby’s cheek. “Surely you know this? Surely you know that your demon Mother has walked free for centuries until she was exorcised—here?”

“She’s here?” Ruby said. “Why haven’t I seen her?”

“Hell is wide and deep.” Lilith tilted her head, snapped her fingers, and Sam disappeared. “It’s finished. Very soon, now, the gates are going to open. You have to be among the ones that escape. You have to keep Sam Winchester safe. I will gather my own army and spread rumors that I am trying to kill the Winchesters. Make sure they believe them. Appoint yourself as their guardian, the little fallen angel on their shoulder. And when Dean Winchester is dragged to hell, be there for Sam. Prepare him as the final offering to my father.”

“The first meal,” Ruby said.

Lilith stilled. “Yes.”

“Before he devours the humans, making way for his kingdom, delivering—” Ruby let her voice trail off. “I remember my name.”

“So do I,” Lilith said.

“We’re human.”

Lilith slit her eyes, looked up at Ruby through her lashes.

Ruby licked her lips. “So when all the humans are gone—”

Lilith pulled her lips tight and snug against her teeth—

“—he’s still going to be hungry. Because he’s a devouring lion, prowling to and fro across the earth.” Ruby felt cold for the first time in a thousand thousand years.

Lilith threaded her still-warm hands through Ruby’s. 

“He’s our father,” Ruby said. “I don’t understand why he would—”

Lilith covered Ruby’s mouth with her palm. “Shhhh. We will think of something. But the plan has been set in motion. It has been written down, and it is happening now.”

“We’re going to erase the ending, right?” Ruby said. “We’re not going to let some bastard who’s not even in hell write it for us, right? We’re not going to let someone who’s never lost his name or his tongue or his voice speak for us, and tell us how we are going to die?”

Lilith smoothed Ruby’s hair. “Never,” she whispered, breath sharp as a blade.

A howling wind whispered on the far edges of hell, growing stronger. Sulfur fluttered in the air, ash clogged Ruby’s lungs and nostrils.

“It’s opening. The gate out of hell. Go!” Lilith said, pushing Ruby towards the winds.

Ruby scrabbled at the vial of names, took it from around her neck, pushed it into Lilith’s hand. “Take care of them for me?” she shouted over the roar of the wind.

In answer, Lilith pulled her in for a kiss, then shoved her once more.

Ruby flung her head back, soul abandoning the body that Lilith had fashioned for her, that Ruby had completed, sure that Lilith would keep it safe for her on her return because there would be barely room enough for a soul to squeeze through the barriers of hell, never-mind dragging a body along for the ride.

As she clawed her way out of the pit, pushing against the raw and broken bleeding souls that had forgotten their names, she smelled something that wasn’t sulfur—something like dirt and gun powder, heard shouts sheathed in throats made of flesh and blood, dulled and untempered, that could hardly flay the flesh from someone’s bones.

She looked up higher and saw the stars, and wondered which ones were angel eyes, which ones had written that this would come to pass, and she kicked up a storm of dust into their faces, and laughed.


	5. Ruby's Host

Ruby found a host—female with blonde hair, thin build. Not like her body the last time she was on earth. It was bigger. Healthier.

Different. Not hers.

She fit into the pores, in the in-between places between organs and bone—settled inside an empty womb and suffused the wrinkled, twisting-coiled surface of the brain. “Don’t be afraid,” she said to the host’s soul.

But the soul was afraid, even though she wasn’t like Ruby—even though her soul was still shiny and smooth, not worn raw away, not burned and charred to its very nub by the fires of hell and the tools of the devils there. She pressed her hand down the host’s shirt, the material a cool kiss against her skin, and swept yellow hair out of her eyes.

Tried to locate herself. She had to find Sam.

“You’re in a war,” she said to the host’s soul.

The soul managed to find her words.  _I don’t have to be._

It was weird, walking on legs with real bones and tendons—wearing high heeled shoes that had worn a blisters against her toes. She lifted her hand and saw that the skin was peeling around her wrist, that her nails were flecked with pale yellow polish.

Everything was heavier here—wetter too as Ruby felt something prick and sting her eyes, falling and tracking makeup down her cheeks. Her shoes clipped against the sidewalk as she started to walk. “You already were, you know. We’re all soldiers whether we know it or not. At least now you know.”

 _What war_ ? The soul’s voice was high, desperate.

She hurt Ruby’s ears.

She wanted her body back—the one that Lilith had made for her. One day, some other day. When they had won, when they had carved a space for the demons, for all the lost souls, their selves forgotten, wandering on scorched feet in the fires of hell. “The apocalypse.”

The soul said nothing at that.

“At least you won’t die ignorant. And if you do die, it’ll be with purpose.”

 _I don’t give a shit—_

“I do, though,” Ruby said. She hated how airy her voice sounded. Had it always sounded so breathy—like it was barely holding itself together—that something so small as a breeze could tear her words from her, rip them to pieces, before they ever fell into someone’s ears? “Without you, I’m smoke on the water. Can’t do a damn thing, which sucks because this is the staging ground—the playing field. So suck it up because I have to suck it up too.” She wondered if the heart scudding against her ribcage was speeding up because the soul was afraid. Sweat pricked her skin—it was cold, and the body shuddered in the wind. “Strike fast. Take no prisoners. Get it done.” Her voice sounded harsh, grating against her ear drums. She pressed her palms against her head, sucked in a steadying breath.

 _I’m a prisoner._

“No metaphor is perfect,” Ruby said. “Look. The only thing I want is to do what I need to do. Because Lucifer is going to come, he’s going to come and he’s going to kill you all. And then he’s going to kill the demons. I’m just trying to keep the body count down.”

 _God will save us._

“Because he’s gonna start now, right?”

 _Oh god, oh god—_

“Why don’t you pray to someone who’ll listen? Why don’t you pray to me? Because I’m listening and I can make it easier for you, okay?”

 _You could leave._

Ruby laughed, twisted her fingers into her shirt. “I already told you why that’s not possible. It’s the rules of war. Sometimes people die. Sometimes people are used. Sometimes they survive. You play the cards you’re dealt best you can even if it’s a shit hand.” She was outside the town now, aiming for the graveyard with the devil’s gate, where Sam Winchester and the others surely were or had been—all she needed to do was pick up their trail, find something of theirs that would help her find them with the craft that Mother had taught her. The shoes though, weren’t meant for such heavy walking, so she pulled them off, hung them by their spiked heels through her fingers, and continued in her bare feet on their tender, new-born soles.

 _So which are you then?_

“The one being used,” Ruby said softly. “The only one tempered hard enough, the only one trusted enough.” She kicked at a pebble with her toe. “But who knows. Maybe I’ll be the one to die. It’s happened already, after all.”

 _Make it easier for me_ , the soul whispered.

“Ok,” Ruby said. “But before I put you to sleep, I need to know something.”

 _Yeah?_

“What’s your name?”

 _Laura_ .

“Okay, Laura.” Ruby paused, so that she could concentrate better. A pebble dug against the sensitive web of skin between her toes and it hurt, but it didn’t hurt, not without the gnashing teeth of the pit. Nothing could hurt after that. “Say your name over and over. Never forget it because it’ll be the only thing to save you, either here or in the pit.”

 _What about heaven?_

“Just say your name,” Ruby said. And when she heard the the host soul murmur  _Laura Laura my name is Laura_  she pushed the soul down deep into the unconscious space—space that Ruby wouldn’t need, space that would cloister the soul so that she wouldn’t forget her name no matter what happened.

When she felt the presence of the host soul, of Laura, ebb away to a light pressure, Ruby continued until she caught up with the Winchester’s trail. She followed them until her hair caught dew drops and her feet left blood on the road. And when they stopped at a motel, she crafted a spell so that she could always find them, no matter how fast or how far they drove.

While they slept, Ruby washed her feet, murmured spells of healing over them that Mother had taught her. Then she broke into a store, and stole a pair of boots that could walk and run, stomp and kick. 

And then she waited in the shadows, waited for an opportunity to let Sam know that she was there for him.


	6. Mother, Is That You?

**Ruby and Lilith**

It had been less than a week since Ruby clawed her way out of hell, found herself a body that could walk and talk and more. Sometimes, when the Winchesters slept in a shitty motel that smelled too much like really bad coffee and stale continental breakfasts, like too much sex and spilled alcohol, like lonely people begging with their empty tin souls, Ruby crouched on the curb, thin, fragile wrists resting on her knees, fingers dangling in the space between, electric lights glinting dully off the fake silver metal of her rings.

It was never really silent here, not like it was in hell. Everything had their names. Even the bits of pollen itching in her nose. There was wind here—hell had wind too, but it was a silent, fanged wind, ripping souls apart.

The only thing the wind did here was dry the sweat pooling in the hollow of her back and blow her hair into her mouth.

She pushed herself from the street, rolled onto the balls of her feet, stretched her calves and her arms and her shoulders, feeling every ligament, every tendon that strung this body together. She strolled down the streets, her palm outstretched over the shrubbery lining the lawns, brushing over the rough bark of the trees that split sidewalks with their too-big roots—dragged her fingertips over fences with peeling red paint.

“Excuse me,” said a small voice. “Are you my mummy?”

Ruby saw a girl standing on the corner under a street lamp. Hair looped in ringlets, dress hemmed with lace. Satiny ribbon bows glued to the tops of her shoes. Her eyes were filmed with white, and she was smiling without showing her teeth

“Really? A kid?” Ruby frowned. She rubbed her chin, remembered the vial of names she had entrusted to Lilith, remembered the body Lilith had made for her and how she had promised to look after them while she was in hell. But Lilith would keep them safe, would make sure of it, even if she walked the earth.

Lilith approached, slipped her hand into Ruby’s. “Tactical advantage. Suffer the little children to come unto me,” she said serenely. “Come on.” And she pressed down hard in the tender flesh between Ruby’s thumb and forefinger, pulling Ruby down the street.

“I thought you were in hell,” Ruby said.

“And I got out again,” Lilith said. “It’s not too hard, you know. I can come when anyone summons a cross-roads deal, after all. I don’t need to wait for a gate.”

Lilith led Ruby to a twenty-four hour diner and ordered herself the biggest milkshake with a huge dollop of whip cream on it. “What do you want?” she said, pulling on Ruby’s hand.

“I’m not hungry,” Ruby said.

Lilith’s eyes hardened as she said, “Nonsense” and ordered fries with no salt because of Ruby’s “sodium intolerance.”

“I don’t understand what we’re doing here,” Ruby said, fidgeting on the booth seats. “Sam and Dean won’t stay sleeping forever.”

“Sam and Dean are where I want them,” Lilith said. “Some demons—such as yourself, will support them. And I’m already gathering support in the west—they don’t need to be watched every second. They’re a stepping stone, not the end goal. I have a present for you,” she said, sliding a knife etched with sigils over the table. “Kills demons.”

Ruby tucked it into her pocket. “That should get their attention.”

“Forget about them for now,” Lilith said. “Because we’re just going to take a moment, and remember why we’re fighting, okay?”

Ruby nodded.

The waiter brought the milkshake and the basket of fries.

“Use ketchup,” Lilith said around her straw as she sucked down her shake. “Just slather it over everything. I swear you won’t regret it.” She gently kicked Ruby’s knees under the table. “And do I ever break my word?”

Ruby shook her head, poured ketchup onto her fries, and put one in her mouth. It was crunchy, hot. Not too greasy, the ends browner than the pale yellow in the middle. She ate another one, then licked the ketchup off her teeth and lips. “These are good,” she said, taking another fry.

“I told you,” Lilith said, smirking. “Now every time you’ll eat them, you’ll think of me.”

**Ruby and Sam**

Demons see differently when they reveal themselves as such. They see the way of things, how things are put together. Ruby, when she blinked her eyes to black so that Sam could know her for what she was, saw the way his body was knitted together. Saw the taint of the demon blood. Saw his bright soul. Saw the power that lurked under his skin, untapped, uncalled for. Saw his fear locked up tight while he fisted the key to it because if he ever lost it, then that fear would run so wild, and he’d never get it back without that latent power, simmering under his flesh.

Ruby forced herself to keep her muscles loose, uncoiled—unafraid as she sat on a sacrificial altar for Lilith’s sake.

Each piece of truth she fed him—the truths that all those people his mom knew were dead (though Ruby suspected that Lilith had more to do with their deaths than Azazel with his keen yellow eyes), the truth about her—pulled her head back further and further, neck exposed until she thought that Sam would just sink his teeth in the soft flesh there and rip her to pieces.

“I could help you save your brother,” she said.

The words pulled him away from her, pulled him away from his mother, pulled him away from everything.

Ruby wondered why people said that demons lied when the truth served so much better.

**Ruby and Laura**

“It’s gonna be okay,” Ruby said, lifting up her shirt to look at the hole in her stomach from where Bobby had shot her with the broken Colt. “Demons tend to ride hard until the spirit moves on, but you’re safe with me, tucked up all nice and cosy in your subconscious cocoon. Lot of people don’t like witches, you know. Think they’re messy and gross and leave a trail of gloopy bodies behind.” She dug into the hole with her fingers until she found the bullet, dragged it out shiny with blood and guts. She slathered a mix of something spicy with herbs, thrumming with magic against her stomach, plugged up the hole. “Demon smoke can hold a body together though until they don’t need it anymore.” She laughed as the witchcraft began to stitch the flesh together again. “It’s probably because something tiny like a stupid bullet hole is nothing like the pit. But this should keep you together, scarecrow, when I go on back to hell for my real body. Though whether you’ll live to appreciate it—well, that’s debatable.”

Laura slept. Probably didn’t even know her body had been shot.

“You’re welcome,” Ruby said.

**Ruby and Mother**

It was just some witches. But maybe that was why she was there—because before she was a demon, she had been a witch.

And the gate to hell had been open—anybody could have escaped.

Mother wore a meatsuit named Tammi. Ruby wondered if Tammi was still in there somewhere, like Laura was sleeping in her head.

“Ruby?” Mother said. “Is that you?”

And Ruby fell into her arms, clutched her tight. “I missed you,” she whispered.

Mother tilted her head forward, brushed her bangs out of the way and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Her hand slid down Ruby’s neck, pushed down hard so that Ruby crumpled to her knees. “I’ve heard about you, Ruby,” she said, crouching beside her, pressing her knee against Ruby’s splayed fingers, driving in with all the weight and force of a possessed body. “I’ve heard how you threw in with the Winchesters—hunters.” Mother gripped her hard by her chin. “Have you forgotten what hunters did to me? I’m going to kill those two, just like they did to me. First Dean, and then Sam. And Lilith will lead us all to freedom.”

“Mother,” Ruby said, forcing her words through her teeth and biting back the ones she wanted to say because this was stupid, this was so stupid because they were all on the same side, Mother and Ruby and Lilith and who gave a shit about anything else. She blinked her eyes, looked away from the flinty black eyes that loomed so close. The hand that gripped her jaw was flawless and smooth, lotioned and soaped to perfection and smelling of lilacs, and Ruby gripped Mother’s hand with her own, fingertips kissing the spot where Mother had once sewn stitches in herself before an open window under a dark midnight, because she remembered, because they were going to carve a space for themselves where they could have their own bodies without hell or hunters or the holy wrath of heaven to devour them whole. And she realized, as nausea swelled in her stomach, that she had never seen Mother’s true face, always masked under the skin of someone else.

But Mother just flung Ruby away from her. “Leave. Now.”

And so Ruby left. Tried warning the Winchesters away because Mother was tough and cruel—she hadn’t forgotten crawling on her belly in a forest, hunting the lord’s deer, their mouths and fingers bloody together—but they wouldn’t listen to her.

After everything she had already done for them, they wouldn’t listen to her. She took in a shuddering breath, flexed her fingers. She remembered the hex bags Mother had taught her. Remembered the cures.

And she couldn’t let Dean Winchester die because she’d lose Sam and then she’d lose Lilith’s trust—which was fucking ridiculous because Mother could keep and gain Lilith’s trust by killing the Winchesters and nothing had hurt so much, not even hell could have split her in two as she made the necessary potion to drive the magic from Dean Winchester’s lungs.

That stupid asshole.

**Ruby and The Winchesters and Tammi/Mother**

“You were one of my best.”

For a moment, there was no war. There were no Winchesters. There was no hell. No heaven. No earth. There was just Ruby and Mother, standing together, close, close enough to touch, just like they had once stood waiting for the deer in the woods.

And Mother was soft instead of hard and cold like before—like she had forgiven Ruby.

They wanted the same things. They really were on the same side.

But they were sacrificial goats, the both of them, Ruby knew as she raised her hand to slit Mother’s throat—not quite fast enough.

“You always were a lying whore,” Mother said, and it hurt more than being pushed into the TV. It hurt more than being flung onto her back—all the wind and her spirit knocked out of her. It hurt more than being strung up on Alastair’s rack as his razor hunted her name.

“Come on, get up.”

And it wasn’t the same as when Ruby had been human. When Mother had shook her shoulder and demanded she get up and learn her words. To get up and go to the forest under cover of darkness.

“I said get up!”

Get up and walk even when her feet were bleeding and her fingers were blue from cold. Get up and be tempered by hell and all the demons there.

Mother grabbed her by her jacket, and Ruby didn’t care if she saw the pleading in her eyes.

Because they were on the same side, and all Mother had to do was trust her, just like she had trusted her all those years when she was human, trusted her enough to switch places, trusted her even through all those thousand thousand years in hell.

It hurt when Mother started chanting, pulling at Ruby with sharp hooked words, plucking her out of the skin she wore, unraveling her from the cells that made up the physical body.

It hurt more when it stopped, when she saw Mother spitting out needles, blood on her lips, because it was a knife wound when other people used the words they had learned against the teacher.

Then Dean stabbed Mother— _over and over_ —and Ruby’s gutted, rip out her entrails and string what’s left of her on the rack because Mother was gone, really really gone, and Ruby would have looked all over hell, would have marched over the endless deserts of sand and glass until her flesh was burned away, until her feet were scorched with blisters, until the vial of names hung so heavy around her neck it dragged her to ground so that she had to crawl to find her again.

Except she could move mountains, she could scoop the entire desert into an hourglass and let the grains fall until they were gone, and she would never find Mother.

“Go,” she told the Winchesters because they couldn’t see, they couldn’t see her clean the knife, smeared with blood and wisps of smoke, on her jeans, the only bits of Mother left—and they weren’t even hers, not really, and Ruby wondered if Mother even had a body of her own waiting for her back in hell—and what happened to those bodies of spun sand and glass that never welcomed back the raw nubs of their souls?

Would someone just feed the empty bodies to the ravening mouth of the pit?

Ruby knelt beside Mother, put her forehead against Mother’s. The skin was already cold and clammy—probably meant that Mother had ridden Tammi hard, that she would have left her strung up wet and gibbering if she had left the host of her own volition.

She probably never had had a body of her own then, if she wanted to seize and take, to stuff up that aching hole of want and need. “I would have made you a body if I had known,” Ruby said. “I would have spun it for you from sand and glass and you would have made it so beautiful.”

A car horn blared outside, and Ruby remembered that there was no time.

That she had a mess to clean up.

**Ruby and Dean**

This was the man who had killed Mother. “The way you stuck that demon tonight, it was pretty tough.” She remembered her anger when Lilith had told her that she couldn’t be there when Dean broke and lost his name in hell, that she wouldn’t be there to capture it safe in her vial of sand and glass. Nothing but cold ashes in her gut now.

Did Dean ever let anything go? “Why do you want us to win?”

And all she heard were Lilith’s words.  _ You’re not like other demons, Ruby _ . “I’m not like them.” She didn’t tell Dean that she remembered her name—he wouldn’t understand, not yet. Not till he was on the rack. Not until he broke. So all she said instead was, “Being human.” 


	7. No One's Slutty Yoda

Dean knew. There’s no way to save me, he said, and Ruby said yes because that was what he needed to hear.

We have to save Dean, Sam said, and Ruby said yes, and I know how, because that was what he needed to hear.

Ruby sat on a park bench, hands folded in her lap. Clouds hid the sun and cold needles, threaded by a north wind, pricked her skin. Her fingernails were blue and marbled purple—blood sluggish and cold. She stretched her arms out on either side of her, rough wood catching at her palms.

It was weird being someone else’s messianic figure. She said, “I can save you” and her breath clouded past her lips and she laughed because it was what she said to Sam, to Dean, to Lilith, and it was what she whispered to all of demon-kind, and her tongue cradled all those words, tasted sweet like candy, hard truths to suck on until there was nothing left, and her skin stretched tight across her rib cage as she counted each time her lungs went in and out until a small hand dragged across her shoulder and a girl in a blue dress and white socks and shiny black shoes dropped onto the bench beside her.

She swung her legs back and forth, ankles crossed. “I want to play a game,” she said.

“Another one?”

“She was playing it when I took her,” Lilith said, smoothing her dress with the flat of her palms, fingers dipping into the cuffs of her socks. She pulled out a length of yarn, circled and noosed. “It’s a game children play.”

“We’re not children,” Ruby said.

Lilith looped the string around her palms.

Ruby buttoned her lips together, remembering how Lilith had crafted a body for her, had locked her up so tight in it, so safe, in a body that she couldn’t be pulled out of, not unless she wanted to. She wished she was back there, out of this body which wasn’t hers and was tight across the shoulders.

“I’m assuming that Dean and Sam are safe enough,” Lilith said.

“They’re at the local sheriff’s office,” Ruby said.

“I’m sending my demons after them.” Lilith hooked the edges of looped string over her third fingers. “And I want you to follow after. I want you to offer to take care of everything. Sam and Dean must not die.”

“They’ll trust me,” Ruby said. “They may not like it, but they’ll trust me.”

“But not like I trust you.” Lilith peered at the shape the string made between her two hands before showing it to Ruby. “It’s a cat’s cradle. But there’s no cat.”

Ruby pinched the the crossed strings with her fingers, dipped down and under, slipping her hands into the cradle. “I know a spell.”

*

It was a real spell too, and the knife was heavy in her hand as Ruby slunk towards Nancy. “You can hold still while I cut your heart out of your chest.”

And Nancy was scared, heart fluttering underneath her skin and bones like a butterfly flapping against a jar, smudging her glassy, wet eyes. Ruby wanted to tell her that it was okay, that it wouldn’t come down to this because she was going to die anyway—it was just a matter of how and not a matter of when.

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Nancy said because the boys were arguing and Sam was on her side and Ruby was giddy because it was working.

But Nancy was right because if they’re going to die then they should have a say about how happened so the only thing Ruby said was, “Damn straight cherry pie.” And while the boys took it outside, Ruby stood close to Nancy, and Nancy looked up at her with her big  eyes, lips parted as she whispered again,  _I’ll do it._  So Ruby pressed the knife into Nancy’s hand, curled her hand over Nancy’s so that they both gripped the handle of the knife with their curved fingers. “You wanna write your own ending,” she said before Dean and Sam came back, slamming doors and hurling their words around like nothing else mattered.

*

Ruby almost slipped and fell in a wet ribbon of blood across the floor. “What are you doing, Lilith,” she said.

Lilith twisted necks around like they were dolls. Ruby heard the bones crack. “It’s bothering you?”

Ruby shrugged. They hadn’t been hunters. They probably hadn’t even known that demons or monsters existed.

Lilith used the front of her dress as a rag. There were brown stains on it. There were brown spots on her hands and under her fingernails. There was red on her teeth. “I’m carving a space for us, Ruby. Just like you wanted. Just like you said.” She pulled herself onto a nearby stool, picked up a silver spoon, plunged it in a bowl of melting ice cream. “I’m a demon. Let Dean and Sam come and get me like one.”

*

“I want Lilith dead,” she said, still holding onto their version of the truth, clinging to it because Dean was huge and tiny in his anger, his words pulling at her skin:  _slutty little Yoda_  like everything she had done was small and worthless and dirty, like putting her head underneath a guillotine blade, lashing herself to a gasoline slicked stake—her mouth was moving, words coming out by rote, spitting them out like beads on a string for Sam to clutch to his heart, but she was waiting for Dean to start it, for Dean to lash out, let that anger and disdain out and she caught it full in the face, and her tongue was wet with blood as she flung herself into him, cleansed those words out of his mouth because she was going to beat him until he was tender scrap for the hellhounds, and they could drive him to the deepest layer, and she wouldn’t care, she wouldn’t give a fuck because Sam was already where he needed to be and if— “Wait! You’re just gonna leave me here?”

Because they couldn’t—Sam was on her side, Sam was desperate—Sam was standing beside Dean, and they were leaving to find Lilith, to hunt Lilith, to kill Lilith—without her, without her to watch Lilith’s back, and she screamed words strung together with desperation and rage because she was trapped, just smoke in a jar.   

She panted when they were gone, throat raw and soar.

This wasn’t over. It wasn’t over until Lilith said it was over.

Until Ruby said it was over.

She lifted her palms, felt the wavering walls of the boundary, found the cracks in the spell, where chalk skipped over slivers of wood, where the spell lines tripped against the grain, and pushed.

*

“You’re one ugly broad,” Dean said.

Ruby stiffened, fingers itching for the knife because fuck it if she let them go anywhere near Lilith, because Lilith had cradled her face and whispered that they said demons couldn’t be beautiful. “Hit me with your best shot, baby,” because they wouldn’t, because she swore that Sam would live and god or whoever help them both, they believed her.

When they entered the house, Ruby called to Lilith,  _I’m here, I’m ready for you—_ and Lilith filled her up completely, until the host body overflowed and Lilith suffused everything. The air she breathed was Lilith, Lilith was her flesh and her bone and everything in between.

 _Do you trust me—_ and Ruby couldn’t answer yes, could only breathe it and believe it and embrace Lilith close until Lilith pushed her out because there was no room, not for the both of them in one small human body barely holding it together, flesh coming apart at the seams.

The wind gusted—blew Ruby far, far away as the hellhounds howled.


	8. Seasons of Love

Ruby leaned against the bathroom sink, prodded her cheeks with her fingertips, traced the outline of her lips, rolled them back over her teeth, bit down on them until it hurt and the skin turned white. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t ever realized her real face was gone—the closest replica back in hell, still beautiful because she had made it, because Lilith had given it to her—but this—

She had never had black hair before.

She shook her head, pushed herself away from the mirror.

There was work to be done.

 **Ruby and Meg**

Meg crushed Ruby’s windpipe, fingers clutched tight around her neck, crushing her against a wall. “Oh, baby, you should be hiding because no way we’re just going to let a traitor like you walk around free.” She leaned forward, and Ruby could smell the sulfur on her breath. “The Winchesters? Really? When you could have had so much more?”

“Stop,” Ruby gasped, kicking Meg in the shins, then the abdomen. “Get off me.” Meg reeled back, and Ruby re-centered herself, prepared for Meg to attack again—she wouldn’t be taken by surprise, not this time.

“You are in so much trouble, Ruby,” Meg said. “I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do to you.”

Ruby circled Meg, muscles tense, prepared. “I remember you. Do you remember me? In hell?”

Meg flinched, fingers scraping at her jeans. “Lots of demons in hell,” she said, tongue curling around her teeth. “Think I can remember them all? Every single one with all their names? But—” and she bit her lips, dropped a wink – “I know a traitor when I see one.”

“Meg. That’s not even your name. You’ve forgotten your name,” Ruby said. “Don’t you remember? How I caught your name in my vial?”

And Meg shifted her weight, let her hair fall over her face, lips twitching against the smooth planes of her teeth. “Shut up.”

“And it’s there, it’s waiting for you—”

“Do you remember my name?” Meg said.

And Ruby swallowed hard because she didn’t, because her memory wasn’t like hell, it wasn’t without end.

Meg scoffed, prowled closer. “A rose is a rose is rose. Why would I care about a name when I’m here, without one, just as real as you—Ruby. You think knowing your real name will make it not hurt as much, huh?”

“Something like that,” Ruby said

“You think because you remember your name, Ruby—” and Meg crooked her fingers around the word— “you think that means anything? You think it really means something? Some name given to you by a person who would spit in your face, pour holy water over your head, send you back to hell? Oh yeah. Boast some more. I can’t wait to hear it.”

“It’s not like that,” Ruby said.

“Well, when our father is released—he’ll give me a new name. One made specially for me.” She leaned in close to Ruby. “And then I’d like to see you take it from me again. If you can.”

Ruby lunged then, gripped Meg by her wrists, pushed her hard against the wall, covered her mouth with her free hand. She chanted the exorcism spell that Mother had taught her but, when she paused for breath, Meg poured herself from her vessel’s mouth, slipped through Ruby’s fingers.

The host body dropped to the floor, flesh cold and without beat or rhythm beneath Ruby’s hand.

 **Ruby and Ruby**

Ruby stared at the face that wasn’t hers in the mirror. Ran her fingers along the scalp that wasn’t hers. Rolled her name under her tongue.

Ruby the Traitor.

Ruby the Demon

Ruby the Soldier.

Ruby: Lilith’s Lover

Ruby: I just want to kill Lilith.

Ruby: Sam’s Jedi Master, Sam’s Lover.

She blinked at the pressure in her sinuses, at the way it made her eyes feel like they didn’t fit.

 **Ruby and Sam**

He pressed his mouth at the cut on her arm, pulled his mouth down the slopes of her muscles, her nipples, her abdomen and navel, her lips, sucking and stroking, drinking from her like she was an overflowing cup.

“Sam,” she said.

He stopped. But didn’t look into her eyes. He never looked into her eyes.

“Ask me what my name is,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Is this like a sex thing?” he asked, licking his lips.

Ruby closed her eyes, swallowed, pushed herself closer. “Just. Come on.”

 **Ruby and Anna**

It was after they had found the tree grown from Anna’s grace, but not the grace itself. When they waited for the morning, Ruby rested, back hard against the wood of the barn, one foot bracing herself as she tried to spool up her strength, her courage, her resolve.

She did not want to see Alistair again. Not after he had tried so hard to find her name. Not after the things he had done—

She closed her eyes, pressed her lips down so that no one would hear her.

In some ways, bound by physical laws, this body was so much more treacherous. She pushed her spread palm against her thigh. The way it could feel that warmth and pressure, but not the way it could feel the molecules and atoms spinning everything into flesh and blood together.

Footsteps crunched against hard, chunks of earth, and Ruby turned to see Anna approaching. Her hair wild, tangled, skin still flushed and sweaty, and Ruby could smell Dean Winchester and sex perfuming her skin, and her stomach clenched because, as an angel, Anna would never smell like that again, impossible really, trapped in a body that wasn’t her real face, everything burning away with that celestial intent.

Anna stood very close to her, finger tips on the thin bones of her wrist. “You really aren’t like other demons, you know. I know I said it before—but I didn’t know who I was.”

Ruby turned away from her, Uriel’s voice still in her head— _ stain in a room— _ like everything was worthless, like she wasn’t her name.

Anna touched her jaw, guiding Ruby back to her so that their eyes could meet. “Ruby, you’re beautiful.” She cupped her jaw, thumbed her cheekbones in soft strokes. “I’m so sorry I screamed when I first met you.”

Ruby blinked her eyes as Anna ran her hands up through her head, bending her head down so that she could press a warm kiss between her eyebrows.

“You’re going to be okay,” Anna whispered.

Ruby made a noise in her throat, hands reaching for Anna’s waist, clutching at her thin, frail hip bones as Anna held her closer, saying words that Ruby couldn’t hear, buried in the red strands of Anna’s hair, the way her lips brushed so close to the shell of her ear, breath warm and damp without the singe of sulfur, the way Anna let her hand slide down Ruby’s back and into her back pocket, touching her all over without cutting deep, the pads of her fingers smoothing and gliding and circling in the small of her back as Anna crowded Ruby closer to the wall.

Ruby fumbled for Anna’s belt buckle, twisting so that Anna was against the building, so that Ruby could have the leverage to unbutton her jeans with quick fingers, to pull Anna’s head back so that the moonlight fell on her parted lips, highlighting the arch of her neck as Ruby nosed at the skin, licking and kissing harder when Anna asked for more.

And when Anna dipped her hands underneath Ruby’s clothes, thumb circling her clit, fingers stroking her lips, Ruby stiffened, braced herself against the wall, as she rubbed Anna through the thin cotton her underwear.

Anna didn’t speak during sex, just tiny little moans until Ruby made her come, panting her name, over and over with every muscle spasm,  _ Ruby Ruby Ruby _ , and Ruby swallowed every syllable with her kiss, tasted every letter against her tongue.

** Ruby and Lilith **

Ruby stretched out naked on the hotel bed, sheets smooth cotton, comforter bunched up around her feet, thick and quilted and warm. Lilith knelt beside her, still clothed, no longer in Laura, but in some other woman that Ruby didn’t like to think about.

Lilith’s fingers played with Ruby’s navel, walked up her the tight skin of her stomach. “I can smell them on you, you know,” Lilith said. “Sam. That angel.”

“Anna,” Ruby said, eyes closed.

Lilith’s mouth was close to Ruby’s ear when she said, “Whatever.” She rolled Ruby over onto her stomach, massaged the knots in her shoulder. “I know what the last seal is.”

Ruby tensed under Lilith’s hands, stomach dropping. They should have been able to change the ending by now, should be able to stop Lucifer from ever becoming free to kill the demons after he had finished with everybody else. “What is it? Can we stop it?”

Lilith pressed hard down her spine, just like when she had closed up the body of glass and sand she had once made so long ago. “It’s me.”

Ruby jerked up, but Lilith shoved her down, braced her hand down against Ruby’s neck so that she got a mouthful of pillow. “Shh,” she whispered.

When Ruby forced her muscles to relax, Lilith loosened her grip so that Ruby could speak. “Then we can stop it. We can keep you from breaking.”

Lilith planted hard kisses fanged with sharp little bites in the hollow of her neck. “I already tried making a deal with the Winchesters. They weren’t interested.”

“But why?” Ruby said, voice tight as her eyes. “They don’t want it either.”

“They don’t want me either,” Lilith said, fingers smoothing away the bite marks in Ruby’s skin. “We’re demons, remember?”

“I thought—I thought we were going to change this ending,” Ruby said. “Not let someone write it for us.”

Lilith straddled Ruby’s waist, fingers playing down the sharp ribs poking under Ruby’s skin. “We won’t—but you will.”

Ruby stiffened, fingers scrabbling at the thin cotton, so smooth, with no purchase to lend to her, nothing to grab onto. “What do you mean?”

“When Lucifer rises,” Lilith said, “when he occupies Sam as his vessel—and you must prepare him—he must be there—he must be the one to break the last seal—”

—and Ruby bit down on her tongue so that she would not speak, she would not—

“—Lucifer will conquer the angels, first—killing the ones who do not follow him. And, then he and the angels will let the world burn until there are no more humans, and then he will slay every demon.” Lilith pulled at Ruby’s hair, gathering it into a ponytail, stroking the sensitive skin there until Ruby shivered. “But you, Ruby, finish it before it comes to that. Because he’s just an angel, for all his talk, and he can be killed like one.”

“I don’t have the weapon,” Ruby said.

Lilith’s hand tightened around her neck, pressure hard and firm. “But you can find one, can’t you? You can find one for me? So that you can rewrite the ending. So that we won’t go quietly.”

Ruby nodded, face smushed against the pillow, eyes squeezed shut. “But what about you?”

Lilith looped her hands around Ruby’s waist, pulled her up so that her back was flush against Lilith’s chest. “Don’t worry about me. Just do this for me—so that my death will mean something, can you do that?”

“I can,” Ruby said, licking her lips. “I know I can, Lilith—”

Lilith put her finger over Ruby’s lips. “What’s your name?” she whispered.

“Ruby—my name is Ruby.”

And Lilith kissed her, whispered  _Ruby_  with each press of her lips, every slide of her tongue. 


	9. Never the End My Friend

Sam drank her to exhaustion. Limbs limp, useless. Like plastic shells sucked dry. She curled her fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, Sam,” she whispered.

“For what?”

“That you and Dean—” she bit her lip, remembered watching Dean stab Mother over and over and how she had to clean it up, got her knees all red, Mother’s blood still in the skin of her, even in this new body. She clutched at her thighs.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know,” she said.

The last time she saw Lilith (second to last time), Lilith’s lips were red because she had been eating babies.

Ruby stared at the wall, shifted uncomfortably in her skin that had been hers for too long now.

Lilith had never eaten in hell.

Her body hadn’t needed it.

Because it was just sand and glass instead of flesh and blood.

And it couldn’t hunger. Not like a host could.

Coma Girl never hungered though. Ruby hungered for french fries. Every time she was with Sam—every time Anna licked and caressed the nub of her soul—french fries just like Lilith had told her how to eat them.

“Look at me,” Lilith said, so Ruby turned and looked. “You don’t like looking at me like this do you?”

“They’re just kids.” Like you. Like me. Once upon a time.

Lilith flowed with something like grace, white gauze clinging to the curves of her, like she was an angel even though she was nothing like because Anna always smelled like spice and incense— always burning even when she wasn’t, like a pillar of fire. 

Lilith touched Ruby’s chin with her fingers. “My womb was stolen from me, Ruby. Do you understand?” And she cupped Ruby’s belly with her hands, played with the navel there with her thumbs. “It’s empty, and so I fill it up.”

Ruby’s face tightened against the pressure building up in her sinuses, the way her mouth watered, throat dry and thirsty as she dragged Lilith close to her by her thin shoulder blades, wound her hand through all that golden hair, spun so fine like gold even as it fell out in clumps in her hand, and saltwater rivulets wound down her clavicle, getting her shirt and her bra all wet.

“Sam, your head in the game here?” Ruby said because when she closed her eyes she saw Lilith broken and gone at her feet, her body of glass and sand buried beneath the dunes in the desert of hell, a skeleton no one would ever find because no one would think to look.

Because even the sand had gnashing teeth and stomachs unending, always hungry, always starving, never satisfied.

It was easier talking to Sam. He thought he was so bad with all his demon blood. He had no room for judgements in his soul. It’s what made him beautiful, she thought.

“I can feel it inside me. I’ve changed—for good. And there’s no going back now.”

Ruby’s mouth clamped down closed and it was all she could do to say, “Sam—” because he’d never smelled of sulphur, never seared her tongue with the foul taste of it and blood and hopelessness.

It didn’t bother Ruby when Lilith’s Chef went down under. She could hear her, even if Sam couldn’t. It was hard for Sam because he hadn’t seen her, not really. But Ruby had seen her, seen all the things she’d done for Lilith—and, suddenly, so hard it made her stagger backwards, relief that Lilith had never demanded that of her because she loved Lilith and that was how she knew Lilith loved her too that she had never asked that of her—but she didn’t forget.

“A priest disemboweled eight nuns,” Sam said.

“What’s black and white and red all over?” Ruby said because of the black robes with white collars around their neck, hearts pumping them up full of blood so that they had the energy to speak their black and white morality read from their little book, their Bible that never mentioned Ruby or Lilith not even once and the history books that would forget about them—Ruby clenched her fist because it wouldn’t be like that anymore, just like Lilith said—they’d write their own ending, their own history.

“And save the world as a result,” Ruby said because they would, they would save it. She wondered if Sam realized that, once he did this thing, once he set Lucifer free, once he let Lucifer in because Sam would—he had to— “Gonna see this through, right, Sam? Sam?” – once she fulfilled Lilith’s final request, made sure her death meant something, that nobody ever fucking forgot, when she killed the devil—that Sam would finally have a place for himself, because hell wouldn’t want him because his soul was too good and besides, don’t play with Father’s toys, and heaven wouldn’t want him—but with Lucifer dead, heaven and hell in shambles—there would be a place for everyone.

Including Sam.

_Didn’t he know that?_

She wondered if he’d be so willing to kill Lilith if he knew. She almost opened her mouth—bit her tongue so hard so that she wouldn’t.

“Sam—” limbs shook, tongue so full of words, trembling and vibrating, pulsating with sounds, some that made sense, some that didn’t— _you going to do it, you going to make everything worth it?_ “It’s time.”  _You going to kill Lilith even though she made me a body that you’ll see one day, a body all my own, a body that’s never had anybody but me inside it, a vault keeping my name so safe that I’d never forget it—_ “Sam—”  _why won’t you answer me have you forgotten your name—_

“Give me a damn minute, Ruby!”

And when Sam turned back to her, face melting with salt water, banishing all that evil away from him, Ruby said, “Thank God—” and wondered if she should kill Him next, after she killed the devil.

Because wasn’t he the one that wrote the devil’s story in the first place? And hers and Lilith’s and Sam’s and wasn’t it about goddamned time that somebody ripped his goddamned fucking pencil out of his cold dead hand, snapped it in two and let the shattered fragments of it just rest there, rot there, and turn to ash?

Ruby wondered if it was technically an altar. If Lilith, in her crouched crucifixion stance was really Lilith and not really a goat. Ruby licked her lips.

This wasn’t a sacrifice

—humans were mostly water, skin holding entire oceans—

this was baptism.

Because the world was going to be reborn, and its mother was going to be Lilith, the world sprung from her heart and her loins, and Ruby swore, swore with her eyes because she couldn’t speak—but Lilith could see it written there in the nub of her soul, just under her name—that she would find her, she would shred through every single veil with her knife, she would cross into the inbetween lands, to find Lilith’s soul, she would find the place wherever the demons went, and she would drag her back from the underlands, and she would not look back no matter how many times Lilith pleaded to look upon her, would not look back until Lilith looked upon the land she had brought about—that they had made together—not until they sprawled on the hilltops, not until they got grass stains on their knees.

And then Sam—hesitated. “What are you waiting for? Now, Sam, now!” because the world wouldn’t just come about on its own if nobody did anything, if nobody gripped it by the heel and pulled.

She couldn’t understand how Lilith managed to laugh. How Sam didn’t hear that her voice was broken and shattered, that she didn’t want to go, that it was all she could do to not fight because she could kill Sam if she wanted, she could ask Ruby to kill Sam if she didn’t want to get her hands dirty, but she just sat there, arms lifted, heart bared and naked, just waiting for him to fucking do it already, and she laughed, she laughed because it hurt—it hurt more than tears or pleas for mercy, and the shards of that voice shredded Ruby’s heart, hocked her limbs so that she couldn’t even run forward and then there was blood on the floor, spiraling into the door, and it would open and Lucifer would  _hear_  and Ruby babbled, “You did it.” And Sam was talking and his face was talking but Ruby couldn’t afford to listen because “guess who’s coming for dinner?” and Sam’s face—just an open question mark stained with blood that hooked into the raw nub of Ruby’s soul like a scythe—how could he not understand, like this was some kind of trick and the blindfold’s just been pulled from his eyes— “You don’t even know how hard this was!” Because couldn’t he see it there, that Lilith’s  _gone_ , written there, just there, and god what if Lucifer could see— “I was the best of those sons of bitches! The most loyal!” more words flooded her mouth but they wouldn’t be enough, she had to be sure, her last act would not be betrayal, it wouldn’t ever be that— “Even you have to admit—I’m—I’m awesome!”

And it fell flat to her ears, but her mouth was full of blood and her lungs were full of water.

But Sam didn’t notice. “Why me?”

And Ruby wanted to scream  _Why anybody you think anybody wanted this you think this is what they had planned you think Lilith wanted to be Lucifer’s first do you, fucking do you—_  “Because…because it had to be you, Sammy.” Just like it had to be Lilith, just like it had to be Ruby—the only people ever strong enough. “You saved us.” And she hoped, she wondered, if he could hear the truth of it because he and Lilith and she were going to save them all. But there were others there with keener ears and so she lied, “You set him free.” She leaned down, was gonna press a promise to his lips,  _and I will kill him, I swear to you upon Lilith’s soul I will—_

—But then Dean broke through and he would ruin everything because he didn’t understand. “You’re too late” — _it’s okay, it’s gonna be okay—_ when Sam gripped her by the arms, knife flashing, baring her open and wanting as Dean stabbed her deep, plunged her knife into her so hard, but not in her heart because he had never known where it was, she had hidden it from them all so long, but hard enough to send her away from that body, tearing through the veil, plummeting past and through and beyond hell, so weak she could barely grab hold, barely heave herself up onto a broken cliff-face, barely see the face that leaned over her own, hissing, “What’s your name?”

She almost asked  _Lilith?_ but then remembered that that hadn’t been the question so she just panted, “Ruby. My name is Ruby.”

“Bela,” the other demon said, holding out a hand. “You ready to get the fuck out of here?”

Ruby grabbed hold of Bela’s hand, clung desperately to the silken, sewn skin of it— _you like it, made it myself—_ Bela said as she shouldered Ruby, and, together, they struggled through the gaping maws of hell, treading carefully between its teeth, leaving nothing but their skin and their blood and their hair behind.

“When we get to the desert,” Ruby whispered, “I need to pick up something of mine and a gift. A gift for all the demons of hell.”

“Something for me too?”

Ruby put her hand over the place Bela had seared her name. “You already have it.”

“We could be wandering you know. We could wander the wilderness for forty years.”

“I’m not afraid,” Ruby said.

Bela leaned over close and her breath was a hot scorching wind down Ruby’s neck. “Good. Neither am I. You know the first thing I’m going to do when I get back? I’m going to find my cat, I’m going to pick him up, going to bury my face in his scruff, gonna breathe him in until I sneeze. What about you?

“I’m going to write a story,” Ruby said. “I’m going to write a story where I kill the devil and then I kill god and then everybody lives  whole with their names and their souls and the spaces they’ve made for themselves.”

Bela scoffed and Ruby shrugged and so two demons wandered the hell-fire wildernesses, not caring that their feet were red and bleeding, eyes fixed on the beyond, on each other, and on the scrawled line of their names. 


End file.
